Filtering by Tag: yoga instruction

I had an interesting experience today- a pilates teacher whom I regularly take class with didn’t realize that I taught yoga. To be fair, I have a confusing identity: I’m a classical musician, which is its own set of training and expertise, I have a blog, and I mostly teach pilates (with a side of yoga). But how did that all end up happening?

I initially trained in yoga (with teacher trainers who were already a bit creative, thoughtful, and unique, before it was cool at South Boston Yoga) and I then took all of the Yoga Tune Up® trainings, which took that weird, creative, non traditional yoga thing into a whole new realm. At that point, I was almost exclusively practicing yoga and running, occasionally biking, with little else. I did my trainings mostly with Trina Altman, Sarah Court, and Jill Miller, who all have successful movement careers (Trina teaches both Pilates and Yoga, Sarah finished her Doctoral of Physical Therapy, and Jill Miller created Yoga Tune Up®). All of them encouraged students and trainees to explore different movement disciplines, to cross train, to be bad at new movement things, and to get geeky about movement, not just traditional yoga asana. They also all three had stories of personal injury, some from yoga asana, which really made me rethink some of the traditional marketing, messaging, and commentary about what yoga is, how often we should practice, what a yoga body looks like, and what the whole point of it is. To be clear, I don’t have any definitive answers, but I no longer practice yoga asana every day, and I started moving in all sorts of new ways.

No one was really teaching the ball work when I moved to San Antonio, and it was an uphill slog of trying to get people used to self massage, but also trying not to be known as the ball lady, because it turns out there’s more than just self massage to good movement classes.

While these new internal somatic learning experiences happened, I also won my job with the San Antonio Symphony, and moved with high expectations of teaching this new, better informed way of moving and teaching yoga, which had already served me well as a teacher in previous regions. This…was not the case. Not remotely. In my first year or so there, I had so many no show classes: I counted once. I was scheduled to teach 9 classes in a week, and no show’s for 5 classes. To be fair, sometimes that’s the time of day and not the content so much (i.e. a random midday or mid morning class, late night class or Sunday afternoon class). I found studios that were interested in hosting me for a workshop, and then they didn’t sell well. I was essentially frustrated and failing. I was not only trying to promote a smarter way of teaching yoga, I was also using massage balls in class, both of which were novel and useful, but students weren’t always interested in either.

I’m so glad that some people can do these poses, but it’s not a pose I care about anymore, nor do I look like that, nor do I care if I ever do a pose like this. I’m interested in the daily practice of moving and feeling better, not extreme poses.

For as much failure as I encountered, I did have students come up to me and tell me how much they liked what I was doing…they just weren’t consistent students or enough to make it a successful class time. I had a studio owner tell me that I was teaching mostly PT like movements in my classes, and needed to do more traditional poses. Conversely, I had medical professionals come to my classes because they liked that I knew anatomy and what the movements did. I stopped teaching chanting because it didn’t feel right to me, I taught less poses in sanskrit, and I eventually phased out of teaching group yoga classes almost entirely just because I felt like I didn’t belong, and I didn’t feel a part of a community.

In short, becoming more informed as a teacher, more intrigued by movement and science, and less interested in fancy asana, meant that the students and teachers of San Antonio, TX, were not particularly interested in my classes or me. Multiple ashtanga based studios near my home featured photos of teachers doing acrobatics, making intense physical adjustments, and repeating the yoga marketing tricks that annoyed the crap out of me; a student in an intense forward fold with a teacher putting tons of weight on their back, only pretty young people in photographs doing extreme poses, glorification of extreme flexibility, spiritual mumbo jumbo…needless to say, I didn’t belong. I knew this when I went to classes that made me angry: teachers telling students that if something hurt, they needed to stretch; teachers creating sequencing that made no sense for the students in the room; teachers telling students that they needed to do as many chaturangas as possible (while teaching to a soundtrack of Taylor Swift and Trans Siberian Orchestra techno holiday music). I knew I didn’t fit into the yoga community when I went to a studio meeting for teachers and the manager said that we needed to physically adjust every student in class, every time they attended. Immediately, my mind went, “WTF about consent? Are any of the other teachers here really qualified to adjust anyone after a 200 hour training? WTF about trauma, feeling safe, and embodying movement without external touch?” It wasn’t great.

So the shift happened. I stopped going to many yoga classes, only the one every week or so taught by my friend, Stephanie Carter, who shared my journey of creativity, new movement strategies, and thoughtful movement. I got to work with Stephanie and teach yoga teachers in training through the Esther Vexler Yoga School, which gave me the teaching outlet I wanted and needed, and I stopped teaching group yoga classes entirely. I started…working out and doing pilates. And it turns out that pilates is a totally different movement discipline, and yes, it has cliques and divisions and whatnot, but I almost immediately felt at home as a teacher and student.

Teachers were creative. Some of them were movement professionals in their own right. They used weird props: inflatable balls, foam rollers, therabands. They knew way more anatomy than most yoga teachers. They didn’t tell me that my tight hips were because I was holding onto stuck emotions. They taught fundamental movements as well as advanced movements, but most classes were pretty sane in their sequencing: students weren’t head standing on reformers or doing things way out of their ability set. The students were more diverse: yes, still most female, but with a huge range of abilities, ages, and health conditions. More importantly, I felt awesome doing pilates a few days a week and then walking+running, the way I had when I first started yoga over 10 years ago. That led me to become a teacher with Karen Sanzo and Erin Burnham of Pilates Unlimited in Dallas, which was an incredibly fun process. I felt comfortable as a teacher and with anatomy and cuing, I just needed to actually learn pilates movements and work with the apparatus. The closed kinetic chains of the machines made me so happy, and I found that my yoga practice was stronger and more connected than ever (on the one or two days a week I did do yoga).

And now I’ve moved to Seattle, and here, I have multiple identities which perplex people. On one hand, I’m a freelance musician, the other, I teach mostly pilates and a little yoga. In my first years of teaching pilates, I’ve realized that pilates clients and students are pretty open to whatever I have in mind, as long as they feel better than when they come in. There is less of an expectation as to what a pilates class or practice needed to look like: sometimes it might be a challenging traditional mat class, other times, it might be a restoring trapeze table session, foam roller class, or self massage session. Different clients need and want different things, which is so refreshing (and more engaging as a teacher). It’s amazing to teach a 40 year old man who wants to work hard right after an 82 year old woman with severe arthritis: they all want to move better and feel better, wherever they’re at, and sometimes that means drawing from yoga, pilates, and other creative movements. I have found a community of students in pilates that I never found in yoga, at least in Texas.

So to answer my teacher’s initial question this morning, yes, I teach yoga. It was my first movement love, and my first teacher training, and I’m so grateful that I did my training where I did and with the two amazing teachers I worked with. But at the end of the day, I just want to teach movement to people who want to become more embodied, who want to move better and more efficiently, and who are open to new things, regardless of the discipline.

I’ve been thinking about the different, though parallel issues with power abuse in teaching in both music and movement, specifically yoga. We have more and more people coming forward with experiences of sexual abuse in both arenas, and it makes me wonder, how did we bestow so much authority to our teachers? How did we end up trusting them implicitly, and sometimes blindly?

Neither yoga study nor musical study is inherently cultish, but there are some interesting patterns that coincide with cult mentality and unhealthy power relationships. Here are a few consistent patterns:

Cult leaders are masters of manipulation and mind control: their tactics may include public humiliation and fear based language. Leaders may also proclaim magical abilities and assert absolute authority.

Of course, there are many other aspects to cult, often based around spiritual practices, money, and more, and you may be wondering what this has to do with anything.

At some point in the last few years, I realized that certain teachers have aspects of these cultish behavioral traits, and inflict harm upon their students. This can take the form of older yoga teachers who made sexual passes at their students, or whose “adjustments” took the form of groping, but it can also include the private instructor at a college who mocks their students for their failures, publicly humiliates their students in group settings, and tells their students that they are the only good teacher out there. While I’ve had some amazing private instructors over the years, I’ve seen this behavior, and only experienced it a few times.

-I briefly studied with an instructor that asked for blind allegiance, that I only studied with her, and only played the repertoire, etudes, and scales she assigned, nothing else. She also told me that other string teachers weren’t as good as she was, and that she ALONE could lead me to success. She also said I had to go to the summer festivals that she taught at, or else I couldn’t study with her anymore.

Now, there are some good reasons to ask for a student to stay on track with their assignments, repertoire, and technique, but denying the validity of all other teachers was a red flag for me. I was a teenager at the time, but I decided this wasn’t a healthy relationship and I started seeking help elsewhere, and eventually switched instructors and schools. The instructor also humiliated me in front of a studio class, claiming that I shouldn't have done well in the school concerto competition, and that someone else should’ve won. (I placed third). It’s only been as an adult that I’ve realized that this same power oriented behavior shows up in so many different aspects of life: politics, teaching, work, and relationships.

In the yoga and meditation community, there have been notable “guru” figures who have fallen from grace- once venerated, now revealed to have abused their power for personal gain, or even worse, using that power to try to leverage for sexual favors, money, and more amongst their followers. A great podcast on Bikram Choudhury’s rise and fall shows some of these power dynamics- self asserted proclamations of magical healing, complete devotion from followers, denial of other yoga practices, abuse of power, and more. Yet, Bikram is not alone. Similar issues have come up in the ashtanga community with Pattabhi Jois, in the formerly Anusura community, in the Shambala Buddhist meditation space, and more. Many keen minds have looked at this pattern of pseudo spirituality and cult behavior, and written about their findings, yet what I find most compelling is the pattern that moves beyond the yoga and meditation space.

Where do these tactics show up in our daily lives?

What political leaders try to use these same approaches to gain loyalty and support?

How do music instructors use some of these tactics as well?

Let’s look at college music instruction, both at the undergrad and graduate levels. Students have most likely selected the college based on the teacher, his or her reputation, and the track record of students before them. There may be an implicit or explicit promise of “Study with me, and you’ll win a job.” There may be an implicit or explicit promise of “this is the best way because it worked for me.” There may also be a denial of other approaches, other performers’ validity, and refusal to allow for cross pollination- this was my biggest red flag as a teenager. If a teacher or performer will listen to no other musician but him or herself, there’s a problem. If a teacher denies all other teacher’s validity, that’s also a problem. When we put our private instructors on a very high pedestal, it opens the doorway to abuse of power, which could be purely professional or sexual abuse.

How do we move forward? As adults, we have the power to question the methods of our teachers and do better. We have the power to not recommend known abusers to students seeking instruction. We have the power to promote many methods and a positive learning environment for students. And as a youngish adult with many colleagues in music and music instruction, we have the potential to create a better teaching environment for decades to come.